I run the Spar shop in the village of Dolwyddelan, we are a small community and the businesses in the village survive on the tourist trade. We have a shop, a hotel and a pub but if any one of us were to close, it would tear the heart out of the place.
Our Post Office closed and was replaced by an outreach service. The village pub, which has struggled under brewery ownership, was on the brink of closure. Luckily for the village, at the last minute a local builder stepped in and bought it, and will continue to run it as a pub.
If the new Community Right To Buy policy had been in place, the current bureaucratic nightmare involved in starting community projects would have been eased. This would have made it much simpler for a local group to take over and save part of the heart of this community.
In our village we are fortunate because local entrepreneurs have been able to save local assets, many other villages are not as lucky. They will, after being strangled by miles of red tape, eventually see their communities eroded and become merely somewhere that people sleep.
The Community Right To Buy will allow local people to run their own local areas as they see fit – keeping the heart of a neighbourhood alive and vibrant.
Mike Skerrett appears in the Conservative Party’s latest Party Political Broadcast – watch it online here
( 3 comments ) Tags: post office
Comment by Robert Hunt on November 19, 2009 at 11:36 pm
Community Right to Buy, a great idea, however if it & especially small businesses are to succeed & prosper, there must be a change in Local Government policy relating to Business Rates. This Labour Government has forced local authorities to increase Council Tax & Business rates in order to relieve the burden from Central Government, but the local authorities are bleeding companies dry even before they start up & make a single penny. The policy seems to be that Councils would rather leave business premises empty & therefore not generating revenue, rather than offer incentives & discounts to encourage business startup’s & hopefully Community Right to Buy. No one in their right mind wants to take on a project knowing from the outset that the first 4 days of every working week would be to earn enough to pay the Local Council, regardless of whether income or profit was even generated. Business rates especially;y for small business should be based on profitability & not purely on the enterprise just being in existence. Companies & individuals pay tax based on profits generated, yet Councils insist on their Council Tax regardless & in many cases money has to be found up front, as you are aware that’s not easy when Banks are not playing ball either. An added incentive to Community Right to Buy would also be to reduce red tape drastically, why do Councils think they have the right to put obstacles in the way at every opportunity & when these obstacles are put in the way there is always a fee to pay just to get papers signed off, papers that in many cases have been generated for the sake of it rather than for any practical reason
Comment by L Porter on November 20, 2009 at 11:40 am
It is good to see a resurgence of practical subsidiarity in politics…perhaps there is some hope for Traditionalist Conservatives like myself afterall. Now if only this opening-up to Localism can only spread amidst the addiction/pandering to Nationalism and Internationalism.
Comment by Rodi on December 28, 2009 at 6:56 pm
It’s all first class comment. Bureacracy kills everytthing in this country. It is actually worse and more repressive than anything we used to see in communist poland. But, how to undo it? That is not easy. The laws are written in stone, as are the interests of the quangocracies and bureaucracies who live off these laws.
But,we all know the supermarkets too have killed the supermarkets, as well as small vital shops. And they killed the jobs too. Countless thousands of country mums pay their family clothing, food and holiday bills with pub jobs that fit with school hours. Kill a pub and you kill a lot more besides.
We dont need more tax on booze, necessarily, to protect pubs and sink the plonkaholics who wreck British life. But we do need minimum legal price for all booze.. Thats for sure. That will keep our pubs and village shops living a bit better and kill about 5 nasty birds with one stone